Iconochasm
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User ID: 314
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
1yr ago
Iirc, the reasoning was explicitly Doylist. Wildbow mentioned at some point that it seemed likely to turn into giant flaming culture wars and so he decided to just kind of ignore the entire glaring topic.
Iconochasm
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1yr ago
Gender roles are different in China.
Is that even true? Do women in China not take more interest in children and babies? Are they more authoritative and aggressive than men? In what way are gender roles different in China beyond superficial elements like clothing? Is a woman in a red dress expressing a different gender role than a woman in a yellow dress?
Iconochasm
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1yr ago
Those men don't seem to be taking many ques from the social justice movement. If anything, it's the exact opposite, something like "I'm talking about people born with pussies, not whatever the fuck you wierdos are on about."
Iconochasm
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1yr ago
Now, the power dynamic today may be that the academics do get to foist their “social construct” definition on the word gender. For a time, there will exist a purgatory of definitions where the previous majority definers are tricked into believing that this is the real definition. But what will happen is that most people will discount the importance of “gender” as a word. It would be as if someone created a new word, “spashiboo”, which refers to a social construction — the majority will simply not care about “spashiboo” and go back to caring about the male/female sex distinction.
I wonder if this is a partial explanation for the use of "females" among some types of young men.
Iconochasm
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1yr ago
I've caught a lot of flak in this sub for "no true scotsmaning" by equating the alt-right with the woke left but I can't help but notice that they seem to be coming from the same place.
I think the deeper philosophy is opaque even to most adherents. But the entry vectors for the alt-right seem to be libertarians who became disillusioned with democracy, and the largest group, woke progressives who stumbled onto an infohazard like crime statistics, or disparate outcome stats between whites and Jews. I don’t know if any of them are (former) tradcon types.
Iconochasm
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1yr ago
I'll be attending a Jewish funeral in NYC in the near future related to my children's other side of the family. Not really practicing, generally middle-class blue tribe types, but there will be more high-achieving and high-believing great-aunts/uncles in attendance. Any customs or issue to potentially be aware of?
I'm assuming I need to force the boy into slacks and a dress shirt, but I am sure there are elements and expectations there that I am totally clueless about.
Iconochasm
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1yr ago
There were too many of them. Take over some forum and you have control of one of a thousand comparable discussion forums. Take over the relevant subreddit (and leverage that into more control over other subreddits) and you can control a much larger portion of the internet.
Iconochasm
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1yr ago
I am talking about 5ths.
Iconochasm
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1yr ago
All else aside, I think the trend of people that didn't have any apparent drinking problem proudly announcing that they've quit drinking and feel so much better is really weird. I'm really not clear what they're optimizing for or what they're experiencing that is ostensibly so much better in their post-alcohol phase. I guess Andreeson spells it out a bit:
I do not have a drinking problem, but part of that is that it runs in my family, and I take some care about it. If a buy a bottle of whiskey, I will have 1-2 glasses a night until it is gone, taking maybe 4-6 nights. But I notice a significant difference in QoL stuff between those 4-6 day spans and weeks where I don't drink at all. It amounts to maybe a 10-15% overall difference in a general "how good do I feel?" sense. Some combination of better sleep, less stress on metabolic systems, etc.
Iconochasm
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1yr ago
I'll admit I'm not omnisciently certain about that version of history I relayed. But the problem with DARE is that it told people wildly exaggerated lies, from a position of authority. Then people tried some pot, realized they didn't kill their friends and destroy their life, and figured that heroin was probably fine too. The anti-vax stuff was also fairly exaggerated, but in a more defensible, joking manner. Also, it was coming from a stance of higher status, well-off STEMlords ripping into their friend's housewives for being gullible and negligent. Basically, I think in those situations, mean girl tactics worked better at manipulating behavior than out-of-touch lectures from the principal.
Do you have any particularly good zingers you would use to ridicule someone who is complaining about the harry potter stuff?
I might go with variations on the Read Another Book memes. Treat caring about Harry Potter at all as low-status and childish.
I'm open to the idea that civil arguments aren't always the right approach. I do want to at least have a rationalization for my position, then I can start making convincing arguments and poking fun (ridiculing?).
I wish you the best of luck. If you have any success, with any approach, please let us know.
What kind of unreasonable demands? So far I've been given "shut down any political project they don't like." That's a strong claim. There are, in fact, many existing political projects that women are more against than in favour of that have not been shut down.
That rhetoric might be a little overwrought, but this reminds me of the infrastructure bill in the early Obama years. It was right in the ruin of the housing crisis, and the people losing their jobs where mostly men. Obama had the genuine insight that you weren't going to easily convince all these construction workers to retrain as nurses, and hit on infrastructure as the big topic to get them back to work while preserving their dignity.
And by the time the plan got through Obama's mostly female and gynocentric advisors, most of the "infrastructure" money had been looted for teachers and nurses (mostly-female professions almost totally unaffected by the crisis) and the rest went to environmental impact surveys and such and basically none of it went to any man who had ever touched a shovel.
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1yr ago
Believe it or not, Journos ride the subway.
Do they? Many of them seem to be children of enormous wealth and privilege, because no one else can afford J-school and then 2-5 years of garbage internships in the most expensive cities on earth. How many of them actually ride the subway, especially outside of the safest business hours?
Iconochasm
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1yr ago
Male power fantasies in fiction are still very common, I think you'll find. There's an entire section of literary criticism in which the ur-narrative is The Hero's Journey. Being the Son of Heaven or some other kind of Chosen One comes standard.
This is actually the initial inspiration for this insight, the difference in how defensive people get about male power fantasy fiction versus female power fantasy fiction. The women tend to get far more upset about their Mary Sues being criticized than the men do when their comparable fiction is criticized. And this ties into the gender roles you mentioned. When men get mocked for identifying too much with Goku or Captain America, most of them seem to eventually learn to sheepishly roll with it, and maybe if they're lucky and earnest they take some enduring inspiration about the value of hard training and hard virtue. Men enact their gender role by doing, and all but the most obstinate or gifted will eventually figure out that they're not the Main Character because their actions provide tangible feedback that they're not cracking home runs every at-bat, or clearly the strongest fighter at the gym. At a certain point they accept that they shouldn't expect to stumble into a fortuitous encounter that radically changes their destiny.
This is also a more developed genre, with stronger conventions about how to justify the fantasy, and a longer track record of subverting it. Even in the 80's, Eddings was mocking his own Chosen One for being a meathead who needs to shut the fuck up and just do what The Prophecy tells him. The breakout from the 90's, Wheel of Time, is about how being the Chosen One is an insane nightmare of relentless suffering. I'm unaware of any of the women's stuff subverting itself even now. AIUI, it's still blank-slate-but-sassy 17 year old world famous assassins immediately captivating the billionaire were-faerie Prince, played totally straight, and the fans of that genre get extremely upset when someone notices that this stuff is on the level of the schlockiest old comic books.
Conversely, women's gender role is more along the lines of being recognized for enduring general value/importance. This allows much less in the way of feedback, because having low-grade people/competitors fail to recognize that value before someone much higher status comes along to see it is a mainstay element of the fantasy. And so I observe women in their 30's getting more defensive than middle school boys when their power fantasy schlock is criticized for being schlock.
End result is that I think by 30, there are many more women who still think they might get swept off their feet by a handsome millionaire if they just have the right Maid in Manhattan encounter, compared to the men who still think they're going to be a rockstar who does MMA and invents new tech on the side.
Iconochasm
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1yr ago
It is the very interesting case of statistical discrimination. If I know 60% of Group X are likely to do bad thing Y, do I avoid a particular member of Group X if I have no knowledge of that individual? Is that wrong to do so?
You almost never have "no knowledge" of an individual. No one is going to think Uncle Phil is more likely to do "bad things" than some 19 year old white dude with face tattoos and a shitty demeanor. You narrow people down by 2-5 subgroup levels just by seeing them, or becoming aware of their existence in a particular context.
Iconochasm
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1yr ago
Come on, there's no substance here.
That's exactly the point. The power fantasy leaves "vapid" in the dust to dwell firmly in the realm of "hilariously fucking stupid", and there's no counter-balancing, reality-checking criticism because Women Are Wonderful, and any such efforts code as mean. This seems to result in a situation where middle school power fantasies are normalized and "respectable" for women in a way that they aren't for men. In the real world, we mock mall ninjas and weaboos, and some of them manage to get the message and grow up a little. Imagine if every pop song, social media outlet, movie and TV show was hammering young men with the message that they were Sons of Heaven and they should just Dragonball Z scream to unleash their warrior spirits at the school marms who oppress their divinely-blessed existence. Somehow, I don't think that would help them become sane, pro-social, reality-based members of society, I think it would foster mental illness, delusion and severely arrested development.
Iconochasm
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1yr ago
Queens of what?
That's the question, isn't it, much more general than just the fertility topic. Every young woman is relentlessly reminded that she is a Qween who Slaaaaayyys, and anything countering that narrative is absolutely haram. But where is her dominion? What does she slay?
Consider this pop hit. #13 on Billboard, on the chart for half a year. If the men do all the work of enthroning the women, then the women will do their part by consuming luxuries and dancing. This is what passes for "female empowerment".
Iconochasm
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1yr ago
As these millennial women enter their 40s, and huge, double digit percentage of them never managed to form a family, they will become a huge cultural force, a massive living testament to the lie their generation was fed and eagerly believed.
The last time we had this, with the excess women after the deaths in the Civil War, we got Prohibition. I think your take here is very optimistic. I think we're more likely to see a renewed movement to ban video games under the fig leafs of gambling and encouraging violence.
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1yr ago
skew uncommonly pretty.
There is something of a stereotype among incel types, in which the male product of a white father and an Asian mother blames his make-up on his lack of height and more masculine features. Essentially, it's sour grapes in which these guys fantasize about an alternate mother that might reroll their build as "tall and masculine" instead of "pretty and good at math".
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1yr ago
Enya holds a special place in my heart. I have fond high school memories of everyone in the group call meditating to Only Time while waiting for the battle.net servers to come back online.
Iconochasm
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1yr ago
I honestly don't think this is a situation where frank and civil discussion is possible. Imagine a parallel post along the lines of "Some of my really good friends are wildly upset about the fact that people exist who don't follow their religion. I still like Jewish comedians. What should I do?" If it's not trolling, it's a genuinely amazing display of innocence.
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1yr ago
A decade ago, a close friend and his baby mama invited me to their home under the pretense of a cookout, then proceeded to defile the ancient compact of guest right by disingenuously feeding me turkey burgers, and allowing the baby mama two hours to lecture me about how vaccines cause autism. This girl was the sort of person who was totally confident that she could have been a scientific researcher if she hadn't been too busy railing against her mildly right-wing mother. The arguments she made during that lecture were deeply ignorant. Things like "complaining about the wrong type of mercury" or "describing the mechanism in a way that chelation therapy really ought to cure autism and failing to notice that no one was using chelation therapy to cure autism". For the sake of social cohesion, and the tattered dignity of my clearly shameful friend, I held my tongue and politely thanked her for her concern, and she continued threatening his child with her malignant idiocy for a few more years.
You see, back in the Oughts, being anti-vax was a left-wing phenomenon, associated with the hippie, "granola girl" subset of left-wingers. They disliked vaccines for being "unnatural", and eagerly lapped up misinformation on social media about the superiority of natural/homeopathic/homemade alternatives. Then, repressed diseases like measles started outbreaking in exactly those progressive communities in places like California. I remember one researcher darkly quipping that you could model the locations by looking at a map of Whole Foods stores.
That dangerous tendency was brutally stamped out by saner members of those communities, not by civil discourse, but by relentless, cruel "dead unvaxxed kid" memes. Being anti-vax was subjected to vicious mockery, and the granola girls quickly dropped it because it was too uncomfortable to be ruthlessly pilloried for being dangerously fucking stupid.
This was the right move, tactically speaking. Rational arguments against the vaccine-autism link had been available the whole time. For most of those people, it was an ego/status thing. As the saying goes, you can't reason someone out of the position they didn't reason themselves into. You definitely can, however, shame them for being low-status losers until they rationalize themselves out of their stupid beliefs and get their kid fucking vaccinated.
And back to your specific situation, I have never, ever, ever, ever seen trans ideologues ever respond positively to civil discourse. I am not saying this about "all trans people". I have encountered plenty of them over the years who seem psychologically normal for whatever community we were in. But of the subset of trans people who are politically activated about the topic, the co-morbidity of serious, delusional derangement seems to be approximately 100%.
If your friends are the sort of people who are deeply upset about JK Rowling in general, I think attempting civil discourse is almost certainly a waste of time at best. I encourage you to try it anyway, for the same reason I encourage leftists to attend DSA meetings - I expect nothing will blackpill you faster, though that will probably burn the relationship. Ridicule will be healthier for your own mental state, and has a better (i.e.non-zero) chance of manipulating those friends into less stupid and contemptible behavior.
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1yr ago
Like apparently men specifically set up society to benefit themselves by oppressing women but I guess men were so shit at it they created a society that also harms themselves so no one really benefits. This is supposed to make sense apparently.
To be fair, this is a common criticism of feminism itself as well. Oft evil will shall evil mar.
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1yr ago
Now that sounds like a fun remix. "Heels get stunnered many times before their pin; faces taste the folding chair but once." "Uneasy lies the waist that bears the Championship belt."
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1yr ago
Big "Kill the Indian, save the man" energy there.
This is actually a low-key important part of the story, though I think there's only 1-2 explicit conversations about it. Practitioner couples write up elaborate contracts, complete with punishment provisions and escape clauses, and then swear to follow the contract. They're taught from a young age to never make a promise to anyone else, especially in the heat of love/affection, and then their marriage traditions bend over backwards to ward off the possibility of foreswearing. And this has a bunch of downstream effects on practitioner culture, when every marriage is calculating and transactional and all human relationships are missing a core element of good faith and comradery.
By what standards? I'd say historically, "child abuse" was common and often understood as being necessary.
This seems really uncommon and difficult. It's quite possible that precedent and karma does factor in here.
I actually liked how this was handled with Zed. It took considerable care and effort to essentially submit a "change of identity form" to the spirits.
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